


A Rainy Night Without Her

by Paranormal_Shitness



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: (‘cobra starship voice) we’re watching straight men turn gay, Blowjobs That Never Happen, Boot Worship, Inappropriate Sexual Tension, Jack eats mud, M/M, Reluctant Dirty Talk, boot licking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 14:51:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15888252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paranormal_Shitness/pseuds/Paranormal_Shitness
Summary: Jack’s training has been handled by the Boss for about a year after the events of the Korean War. It was her idea to have Python assist her but she might be regretting it.





	A Rainy Night Without Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PsychoBug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychoBug/gifts).



> This is a scene from a fic I don’t know that I’ll ever write because pair so rare.
> 
> Edited, as always, by Psychobug

You could tell a lot about a man by his boots. What kind of wear there was on the tread. The way the scuff marks hugged the toe. How the tongue folded against the laces. If the cuff was still box stiff or had been broken soft. Jack thought maybe that was why it was such an intimate exercise. Boot Blacking.

But it wasn’t something he generally found himself wanting to do.

Python was about eight years older than him. Jack knew that because the Boss told him. He was an honest man on a mission, but he was no good at managing his own debts and had a habit of blowing out real big with his girls. Jack knew that because the Boss told him too.

But there wasn’t an awful lot Jack knew about Python that the Boss hadn’t told him.

He knew it was raining. And there was mud outside. He knew Python had to slog through it all the way here and his boots were a mess, and the Boss wasn’t going to be back for maybe a few hours with the weather like this.

‘Thanks,’ Python said as he dried his sandy hair on the towel Jack offered him. 

Jack grunted

‘You know I fucking hate water?’ Python soldiered on.

Jack didn’t know that. The Boss hadn’t told him. Must have thought it wasn’t important.

‘It’s just goddamn everywhere. I’ve got it in my asscrack. Worse than sand, this shit.’

Jack bustled him through the hallway into the sitting room and laid another towel out on the couch.

‘Shit you’re eerie when no one’s around. Anyone ever told you you’re a fucking ghost, kid?’ Python asked

Jack shrugged and Python laughed. Then he sat down on the couch. Stretched his legs out real long and wide.

There was mud sliding off the toes of his boots. Dripping off the heel. Staining the Boss’ nice carpet, and wouldn’t she hate that.

‘You like horses?’ Python was asking as Jack turned away and walked into the bathroom. ‘I got this streak going down at the track I wanna keep on but I’m torn between a pair of fillies. If you don’t tell the Boss I’ll let you pick one for me.’

Jack grunted again.

‘Hey what are you up to in there, anyway?’

Jack stepped back into the doorway and brandished his polishing kit.

‘Was-at?’ Python asked and Jack didn’t really know how to answer.

He just put his head down and crossed the room as efficiently as he could.

‘Your boots are dirty,’ he grunted as he dropped into a kneel between Python’s feet.

Python’s legs tensed like a cage around him, heels jumping apart a bit.

So Jack hadn’t just misinterpreted this. Python recognized the gesture as well.

‘The Boss’ll be back any minute, right?’ He asked like that had anything to do with what Jack was doing. 

Jack grunted again. The zipper teeth ground as he pulled the pack open and reached in for a clean rag. 

‘And come on,’ Python pressed, voice on that harsh whine he sometimes used to talk the Boss down from a stubborn call, ‘they’re too dirty. You’re gonna ruin that cloth.’

‘Fair enough,’ Jack said, shoving the rag back and putting his pack aside.

‘See? Isn’t that better,’ Python was saying but Jack still had every ounce of determination he sat down with as he reached out and picked up the man’s right boot.

The continuous patter Jack had come to expect from him over the short time they’d been acquainted died on his tongue. Choked up and shriveled out. He had this wide eyed look on his face that said he knew he shouldn’t’ be doing what he was doing but somehow he’d found himself at it anyway.

Jack kept their eyes locked as he bowed his head.

‘You’re not gonna-‘ Python started as Jack’s tongue pushed into the mud on his toe. It was cold and coarse and tasted like training sessions after a good rain like this. 

Python made a strangled sort of noise. Like a panicked rabbit caught by a fox. 

Jack swallowed. And it seemed to happen on the beat of his adams apple, time froze. The ligaments of Python’s leg strong-tense like a vise under his fingers. The sound of an accompanying gulp echoing in that tiny eternity. One of those moments where you know you’ve made a decision that is going to change things. Irrevocably and unfixably.

His mouth tasted like dirt. There was gravel in his teeth that pressed like ice against his tongue. 

Then Jack pushed his tongue back out for another pass and the breath Python had been holding rattled out between his teeth.

‘Holy fuck,’ the man said quietly.

Jack liked him. He liked that the Boss thought it was a bad idea to like him and he liked the way he’d melted into the couch, trying to hide his face in one hand. 

The Boss said Python was stupid. Python was always ready to make a bad gamble. Get too hot under the collar and mouth off.

Jack knew he was a bad gamble. Which made the Boss a hypocrite and Python a real player pushing to bust.

‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ Python warned him, and they were in that sort of Mexican stand off where the dealer asks the player if he wants to hit or stay when he’s one three off his mark and the odds are unknowable.

Jack didn’t listen.

He just ploughed on ahead, not really worried about what Python might have to say because he knew the man couldn’t say anything without risking his own ass.

They fell into a tense silence after that. He could hear Python’s toes squirming in his boots. A tap-tap rhythm under his lips. Feel him stock still pressed into the couch cushions. The man’s breathing started fake calm and climbed rabid in a way Jack could hear the frustration.

Under the mud the boots tasted like polish. Well cared for. There were ridges just at the tip of the toe from where he kicked the ground when he idled. Further down, the creases at the head of the lacing were deep enough Jack could almost see him squatting outside for a smoke, joking with his unit mates. 

Jack turned the boot in his hand and pressed his tongue along the inside arch just above the sole, tracing the line of the stitching. Python made a stilted noise that might have been a groan on another night with another person kneeling at his feet. Jack swallowed hard and pressed for leather. 

The mud came away slow. Sheets at a time on his tongue. Clinging to his lips. He paused to swallow often. Felt Python squirm a few times in response to it. Discipline cracking under frustration.

When he’d finally finished with the first boot he took a moment to sit up, mouth smeared with mud. There was grit in his teeth when he smiled. 

Python’s face was somewhere between livid and mortified. His mouth worked, open, flashing white beads of teeth behind the pinks of his lips but he didn’t say anything. Jack dragged his finger across the deep indentations along the inner ankle of the clean boot as he let it go fully.

‘You’re not,’ Python started but if he really wanted this to stop he’d be putting up much more of a fight. Jack knew that. He’d trained with Python before. Gotten his ass handed to him on a number of occasions.

Jack held a muddy hand up and licked it clean.

‘God what is wrong with you?’ Python demanded, voice high and tight, emphasis all drawn out along the word “wrong” so it felt creased with echoes of the inseam of his pants. As if something had pressed it there.

Jack reached out for the other boot. Dipped his head low and pushed a flat path through the mountains of mud caked to the stitching. 

‘You’re sick, kid,’ Python breathed.

Jack made a sound that he meant to be a grunt but came out more of a moan, muffled as it was against the soiled leather in his mouth. And Python hissed like the snake he was named after.

There was a shuddering breath that went rattling over the crests of his teeth before the man asked, ‘You get down on your knees like that often?’  
Jack paused for a second. He could feel the tone of the interaction changing again. Python loosing his poker face. 

‘Shouldn’t have fucking said that,’ the man muttered into the palm of his hand. 

There was a feeling of triumph in the smirk that rolled out over the roughed leather in Jack’s mouth. Something a soldier shouldn’t feel but he reveled in anyway. Self satisfaction. Personal gratification. Something like that.

‘You know I don’t do this kinda thing,’ Python insisted.

Jack looked up at him and swallowed again.

‘I don’t.’

Pushed his tongue down the under the laces and sucked.

‘I have a girlfriend right now. I should be at her house.’

But he wasn’t. He wasn’t at her house. He was here. And the Boss was gone and Jack could do what he liked if he felt the whim to. He could clean Python’s boots for an hour if he wanted. Sit here and lick them to a shine before reaching for the polish and finishing the work off proper.

Python’s toes curled somewhere under Jack’s chin, tugging his ankle down and pulling the laces up away from the muck stuck beneath them. Jack hummed as he continued sucking them clean.

‘Her mouth isn’t as pretty anyway,’ he could hear Python muttering and sure as shit Jack had been on his knees like this before for several reasons. Even literal bootlicking like he was doing now. But he didn’t think he’d ever come anything close to liking it before. 

Definitely never enjoyed it like this. Well enough it could set an ache in him. Something weighty against his own leg. A kind of itch along the base of his spine.

Python tilted his head against the couch back and hissed again. Jack watched his throat bob as he swallowed heavily. Watched him lift his hand off his face and look back down. The moment their eyes met his hand moved. Jack didn’t have to break eye contact to see it. How he reached. What he reached for. The way his fingers curled around an outline of something uncomfortable in his pant leg.

This had probably gone too far for casual living space activity. He suddenly had a horrified thought that even if she was delayed by the weather, the Boss was certainly on her way home at the moment and here he was doing something that crossed the line of questionability into something thoroughly, inexcusably, inappropriate. 

Of course whatever panic that caused didn’t register physically. He was like a train locked on a track. Headed for certain collision but unable to stop or change course. A soldier does what a soldier has set out to do and he set out to lick Python’s disgusting boots clean come hell or high water. 

Even, apparently, if that meant having the Boss herself walk into her own living room and find one of her ex pupils palming himself through his pants while her current pupil essentially blew his shoes. 

Doggedly, he turned the boot over in his hands, scraped his tongue along the outside, used his teeth to gently pry a stubborn clump of grass off the outside of the heel, and spit it onto the carpet.

Python’s foot jumped in his hand. Excitement making him jittery enough Jack got the feeling that even with his long dating history he wasn’t going to last long here. If he were more human all together, Jack might have felt flattered. 

‘You should be utilizing yourself better,’ the man mumbled. Apparently he was back to the constant chatter now that the damns had broken and they were left to fend for themselves against the rising flood waters. ‘You’re wasting your fucking tongue like that.’

Python had a point, Jack thought. It was a very good point. The kind of event altering point a good leader made at a crucial time. Just as the agreement had settled and made its move. Just as Jack had reached up and cupped his palm over the curve of Python’s knee, the phone rang.

A piercing shrill tolling, like a fire truck bell on a hot summer day rang out from the kitchen. Jack almost hit the floor like a grenade had gone off. Python ducked and yanked his leg up so fast it looked like he might break his own nose.

Then the ringing stoped. They stared at each other, blankly horrified by their own actions. 

The phone rang again. 

Jack fumbled over himself shoving his polishing kit back together fully, and stood up, stumbling toward the kitchen.

One the third ring he answered.

‘Considering the time it took you to get the phone I’m assuming Python’s already beat me back, hasn’t he?’ The Boss asked.

‘Um,’ Jack said, looking over his shoulder toward the kitchen door. ‘Yeah.’ There was still mud in his mouth and as he spoke it began to rapidly sour.

She breathed heavily through her nose in that disdainful way she often did and then said, ‘Listen, Jack. I want you to go outside and make sure the firewood is dry. If it isn’t I want you to haul all of it in to the garage. Which means you’ll have to clear out a suitable amount of space. If I’m not back by the time you’ve finished that I need you to change the oil on the car and make sure there’s no build up in the engine block.’

‘Right,’ Jack said.

‘I’m on my way back now but the weather’s making this impossible. I should be home in an hour.’

‘Right,’ Jack agreed again, hooking his fingers into the phone cord and letting his hand hang there.

‘You can do all that for me, can’t you Jack?’ she asked and it wasn’t a question in the slightest.

‘’Course,’ he said.

‘Right. Then Jack,’ she said, voice pitching up to grab his attention before swooping back down again ominously, ‘don’t let yourself be idle.’

‘Never,’ he grunted into the receiver.

‘Alright then I should see you both around ten.’

‘Right,’ Jack said.

The other end of the line clicked dead but he took a moment to hang up on his end. She had him pinned like a bug on a board. From her tone of voice to her instructions. She knew somehow. Of course Jack didn’t have to tell her anything about himself or Python for her to know it. She just did. 

Women’s intuition or something like that.

He bit his lip as he turned to the sink and flipped the tap on. It took longer than he would have liked to rinse his mouth out but he did it anyway because he wasn’t sure he could face Python as disheveled as he still was. When he was done he stepped back through the kitchen door. 

‘That the Boss?’ Python asked, voice tight.

‘Yeah,’ Jack grunted.

‘And how’d that go?’

‘I need to go dry out the firewood,’ Jack told him with a tone of reluctant finality.

‘Sounds good,’ Python agreed. ‘I’ve got my own shit to take care of anyway.’

They both knew what he meant. Jack wished he could do the same but hearing the disapproval in her voice had just about stopped him in his tracks and no matter what he might want he couldn’t imagine going back to himself that way. 

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Python stood up as Jack made his way to the back door and headed down the hallway for the bathroom. Just as Jack let himself outside, he felt the house shudder with the gentle pressure of Python shutting himself up to do his own dirty work.

It was cold. The rain was coming down off the awnings in sheets and the firewood almost definitely was not dry. Jack stood there for a moment with his back to the door and watched the water fall in curtains just inches from his nose until his head felt clear and his shoulder’s had loosened up.

There was still a pit in his stomach when he mustered the ability to step into the yard though. Part of him hoped maybe the rain would take care of that.


End file.
